How San Francisco's ban could impact facial recognition tech

May 16, 2019

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On Tuesday San Francisco became the first US city to ban police use of facial recognition tech.
Proponents of the ban say that the tech offers a slippery slope for mass surveillance while proponents of facial recognition Emission, say that it��s a useful policing tool.
Aias?
Yes?
Do you expect more cities to follow the same suit in San Francisco?
I think the outright ban is a little bit much subtle, i don��t think cities will do that right away.
I did see somebody talk about it more.
Tory maybe, they don��t even use this As a primary method of identification maybe the secondary or maybe it's used in a very light way but the outright ban I think is a little bit much.
There must be a different way to regulate something like this.
It's also interesting that this is obviously not a federal ban.
It's still being used in a variety of other places, right?
Yeah, so I was looking an article about this and this does apply to San Francisco police and agencies.
But the san Fransisco Police does not use this currently.
So nothing's changing there plus facial ID tech is a available at airports, international airports and ports.
But that's Federal jurisdiction which means this ban has no effect on those areas.
Which means that if I went to the airport in San Fransisco.
San francisco international airport they could use facial recognition to and
In the area so it's it's not like the entire municipality and everything in it
Here the presidio is federal like you can't use this
So some additional information about this the georgetown law center on privacy and technology which has been looking into facial recognition technology for quite some time came out with a study today this morning Saying police are using flawed data to run facial recognition searches.
Those include using artist sketches, editing images to add eyes and lips, and searching for look alikes.
So to me this seems like if people are already a little shaky on the use of facial recognition tech, this is obviously another point to say, hey Maybe this isn't the best thing.
Yeah, I mean, if you were an eyewitness you go Hey, that guy like Ben Fox Rubin, they should be able to show a picture of Ben Fox rubinsince he's so well known
[LAUGHS]
Right.
Now maybe,
Of course.
I think one of the cases actually was Woody Harrelson that David Schwimmer look alike lot of people like that.
So the idea of saying this person looks like another person would be usable in a police sense, the idea that the, a computer is doing it and potentially getting it wrong again.
It that final step, if for some reason, the police are deploying arresting drones, yeah, I think there's a real problem there but if there is a person then going, this is completely wrong or this is completely right.
At least there should be a due process after that
Yeah, and I think that, you know.
The idea that this was proposed in the first place is the facial recognition task is supposed to be more accurate or more creditable than the human eye sometimes.
Or it's able to pick certain things up, for instance, if you're wearing a different pair of glasses, if you have longer hair, if you dyed your hair.
There are sorts of different ways to maybe Mess with the human eye which the facial recognition tech is expected to be able to just kind of sift through.
Unfortunately, with this study, it seems that hey, maybe they're messing around with it a little too much.